“She has also been criticized for her view on suffering. She felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus.[43] Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International , criticised the failure to give pain killers, writing that in her Homes for the Dying, one could “hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief. On principle, strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given. According to Mother Teresa’s bizarre philosophy, it is ‘the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ’.”[44]”
It’s cited and everything, but that’s as far as I go.
Sweet Jesus, dude – are you seriously comparing basic pantheistic faith (still practiced by millions of believers, including the Dalai Lama and Tina Turner, after 10,000+ years) with fucking unicorns??? In any other nation, a straw man that size would trigger food riots. :rolleyes:
Point taken, but I don’t see how that’s out of line with standard JudeoChristian ethics – i.e., inflicting the Sufferings of Job upon another human being for the purpose of your own spiritual salvation. (That kind of twisted logic is not unique to religion, btw. But I digress…)
Buddhism is not pantheistic, is not a faith and is not 10,000 years old. Having said that, all supernatural beliefs are equal. There is no difference between believing in gods and believing in unicorns. Actually, unicorns are slightly more plausible.
I’m not familiar with the details of the Fatima claims. Can you give me a quick summary of what you think happened on this occasion? Is the wikipedia page (I assume there is one) more-or-less accurate?
All of the above, pretty much. Here’s one thing we know for sure - the sun didn’t fucking move.
Basically, you had a mob of credulous, superstitious, ignorant peasants staring at the sun until somebody imagined that they saw saw something, then the power of suggestion did the rest. Everybody else started imagining they saw it too. Some were probably also lying, but suggestion is a powerful thing, and people are stupid.
You’re confusing truth with perception. The “truth” is that the elephant is objectively an elephant. That does not change just because individual perceptions of the elephant may be incomplete.
This is one of the most asinine things I’ve ever seen written here. You don’t have any education at all in scientific method or critical thinking, do you.
No, dude, it doesn’t work that way. It works like this. We already know what the laws of physics are. If you hypothesize something that would contradict tjhose laws then we already know you you are hypothesizing something that would contrradict thos laws. It isn’t necessary to see it contradicting those laws to know it woul;d contradict those laws (and I can’t get my head around how you woulkd even think that makes sense at all).
You have to actually define those things. You’re the one who made them up. They’re nonsense words until you define them scientifically, and it’s beyond asinine to say that it’s necessary to observe something happening in order to say it can’t happen.
Asking you reasonable questions shows a “false sense of intellectual superiority?”
Absolutely. How is believing in unicorns without evidence different from believing in God without evidence?
Your position seems to be that if atheists can’t absolutely prove that God doesn’t exist they should withhold judgment on the matter. But there are a great many things whose non-existence we can’t absolutely prove. So if you’re going to be consistent, you should withhold judgment on them as well.
I don’t believe in either God or unicorns because there’s no evidence for either. If at some point in the future some evidence for either appears, I’ll reconsider my belief. But until then I’ll continue to disbelieve in both of them.
My question to you is: How do you reconcile your belief in God with your disbelief in unicorns? Why do you apply different epistemological standards to these two hypothetical entities?
For the record, I think very few individuals ever believed in unicorns, even during the Dark Ages – most rational people can differentiate between reality and cultural mythology. As for the Revealing Science of God – well, that’s something you either choose to accept on faith, or ignore at your own peril. (Not that it makes much of a practical difference, at least in the Buddhist faith. Very few souls ever visit Naraka, and even that hellish region burns for a mere 3.39738624×10[sup]18[/sup] years…compared to eternity, that’s an eyeblink!)
A non-response is indeed an answer…and if you must know why, it’s because I’ve run out of anti-migrane meds and I can’t see my doc until Monday. (Meanwhile, my ex-Doper friend is LHAO and texting me: “Told you so! I told you so!” – yeah, what a jerk.) :smack:
The null hypothesis of no god, no higher intelligence, is not considered absolute truth - just the default until someone shows otherwise, which you haven’t even come close to doing. The reason that there is no higher intelligence in the work of the theorists is that, as Laplace said to Napoleon, they have no need of that hypothesis.
I have no trouble with the concept that there is no meaning or purpose to the universe, except the meaning and purpose that we as intelligent entities see in it. If you think that something has assigned a meaning, you need to show some evidence that this something exists. Without that, you are like someone who says their life’s purpose is defending their city from Lord Voldemort.
Scientists, by the way, often have provisional faith in the outcome of an experiment before it is conducted. Good scientists abandon this faith as soon as the facts show it is wrong.
For thousands of years, the majority of the human race believed that the sun and the moon were gods. The ad populum argument is a fallacy, and all supernatural beliefs are equally irrational.
Pascal’s Wager. Snerk. When all you can do is threaten us with your powerful sky sorceror you’re basically admitting that you’ve got absolutely nothing in terms of evidence.
'revealing science of God." Heh. What does that even mean? It doesn’t even make semantic sense. Science is a method of discovering information by empirical testing. How does that word have any application to believing in fantastic claims without evidence?
There are no necessary beliefs in Buddhism. It isn’t a “faith.”
What possible difference does the number of people believing in an idea, make? A billion mistaken people are… [drum roll] …mistaken.
(I’m pretty sure you’re making an Appeal to Popularity here, as Lobohan has already suggested. And I fervently hope that they taught you in English Major School that this is a fallacy.)
How so? How is belief in God “rational” and belief in unicorns, not? How can you be so sure that the idea of God is not also just “cultural mythology”, that just happens to be more…popular?
Be specific.
Ah. I was wondering when the Argumentum ad Baculum, in this case hell/Naraka, would make its appearance.
“Ignore God at your own peril,” indeed. I grew up hearing this Scheiße at every single sermon in my hillbilly-Tennessee Southern Baptist congregation. I would have expected more from pretty much anyone on SDMB. You just totally lost the small remaining shred of respect I had for your position, fuzzypickles.
Have fun continuing to back-pedal, goalpost-shift, redefine terms, and avoid direct challenges. I’m done with this particular exchange.
